Rollin' Walker River

Soon after coming back from Chawanakee last week, I was off on another weeklong camp, the Sierra Service Project. The purpose of the trip was to help out Native Americans living on the Walker River Reservation in Schurz, Nevada. It is church-sponsored and I went with the El Camino Real Diocese of the Episcopal Church. We met on Saturday afternoon at St. Francis in San Jose, and did a few icebreakers to get to know the different people, including a large number who had come from (gasp!) Carmel, Pacific Grove's rival town (at least when school is concerned). After that we ate spaghetti and watched The Martian Child. The next day began a 7-hour car ride to Nevada. On the drive, we stopped to get subs at Port of Subs, a store oddly similar to Subway, with a special deal for a $10 2-foot-long (the tagline: "much better than those $5 footlong guys!"). We learned on the way that we would be staying in an old abandoned market in the town.

As we pulled up at the market, the whole group of staff ran out singing, dancing, and pounding on the car doors. We came in and they had music playing and everyone was talking. The other church groups there were: St. Mary's Episcopal from Napa, Cho Un Korean United Methodist Church from Sacramento, and the Borrego Springs UMC. We turned out to be somewhat at a disadvantage because all the other church groups already knew all the members, but we were from a variety of churches.

The weather was very unusual on Sunday: there was a huge wind storm lasting for quite a while, followed by a power outage. Dinner that night was PB&J, due to lack of power for the kitchen appliances. In the evening, our work groups were revealed, and mine was with Connie, a counselor from the Borrego Springs group. It also included Blake Foster from Carmel, who I had gotten to know a little the previous day. The others were Colleen and Sophia from the KUMC, Erica from Borrego Springs, Kevin from Napa Valley, and Nick, a 4-year veteran of SSP who was also from our El Camino Real group. Additionally on Tuesday, a second counselor named In arrived from the Berkeley KUMC and he helped lead our group as well.

The rest of the week proceeded pretty much the same way. Every morning we would get up at 7:00, woken by the staff singing some song involving Rise and Shine, and often including Noah's Arky-Arky. Ugh.... Also, one day they plugged in an iPod and played Cat Stephens' Morning Has Broken. For breakfast, we would drive down to the local Methodist Church and have a buffet-style breakfast with eggs or other common breakfast items. This would be followed by our work site.



My work team was chosen to repair the roof of a carport belonging to Evelyn Cook, an old Native American lady. Her house was quite nice, but the carport had water damage and the old roll-on roofing was not very satisfactory. The job was to tear off the roofing, the tar-paper, and the wood planks, replace one of the stringers, and put new OSB (oriented string-board) planks back on. The next group coming would have the job to put on new tar and shingles.

Work days were from 9 to 4, with a lunch break at noon, and the first two entire days were spent prying up the old roll-on asphalt roofing, which was probably the hardest. It seemed probably 10 degrees hotter up on the roof, and the nails were really hard to remove.



After this hard job, it got significantly easier. Originally, we were just going to pry up the old boards and then put on the new ones, but our construction coordinator Cass decided that it would be more efficient if we pulled up one and added a new OSB one, then pulled up another and continued that same way. Our group would split up and 3 or 4 of us would go up at a time. It worked fine until Friday, when we only had a half hour left to finish the project and then we discovered that a board we thought was rectangular was actually L-shaped. We had to rush down, measure it, cut it, bring it back up, and nail it in place.

At lunch at the worksites we would eat Peanut Butter and Jelly, and answer questions from a Spiritual Sandwich paper, including If you were a cookie, what kind would you be and Why? and What do you think of people who think the landing on the moon was staged in a studio? as well as many other very random questions designed to make us get to know each other. At breaks we would go into the A/C powered van and play cards, usually the ever-popular game BS, of which I had a lot of practice at from Chawanakee. After we finished working, we would make secret stops to a gas station mini-mart nicknamed "Site 3" and buy snacks.

When we would get back, we would take glacially cold showers in our bathing suits at the tribal gym, and then go to dinner at the Church. While waiting for dinner, we played Apples to Apples and listened to music. Dinner was in the same buffet-style, and included potatoes, spaghetti, pizza, and more.

Chore time was after dinner, and when we got Bathroom Patrol, it turned out to be quite hilarious. The staff had posted name signs on the four portapotties: Henrietta, Pablo, Millie, and Jasper. At the beginning of the week, Pablo had become the smelliest, so everyone started avoiding using and cleaning "him" for the next couple of days. On our BP day we all called other ones and Colleen and Sophia were stuck cleaning Pablo. To our surprise, Pablo was now the cleanest. It was very ironic. Another chore was to organize a spiritual moment for the evening, so when our turn came around we sang Amazing Grace in English and Korean, and Connie played an obscure instrument called a bode psaltery, which she also let us try out in free time.

The evening program after dinner was usually a big circle, where we would give site reports and sing songs. On Thursday night however, we drove down to Walker Lake and hiked up a hill where the staff told stories and we watched the sunset. It was a very neat experience. When evening program ended, we would go "jamify" and get ready for bed. We also played a Korean "frying-pan game" that the KUMC people taught us. On Wednesday a big treat was an afternoon trip to the Weber Reservoir, where we went swimming, ate chips, and listened to music for quite a few hours. I was expecting artic-cold water like Chawanakee, but it turned out to actually be warm.

On Saturday morning, we packed up all our gear and drove that same 7-hour trip back home. I was in the van with Joey, someone from our church group, and we counted that he farted 38 times on the way back to San Jose. I feel sorry for the people who had to ride with him all the way back to the Monterey Peninsula.